As applications increase in complexity, it has become more common to include specialized processing blocks in integrated circuits. Such specialized processing blocks may be partly or fully hardwired to perform one or more specific tasks, such as a logical or a mathematical operation. A specialized processing block may also contain one or more specialized structures, such as an array of configurable memory elements.
Examples of structures that are commonly implemented in such specialized processing blocks include: multipliers, adders, accumulators, arithmetic logic units (ALUs), barrel-shifters, various memory elements or storage circuits such as first-in first-out (FIFO) circuits, last-in first-out (LIFO) circuits, serial-in parallel-out (SIPO) shift register circuits, parallel-in serial-out (PISO) shift register circuits, random-access memory (RAM) circuits, read-only memory (ROM) circuits, content-addressable memory (CAM) circuits and register files, logic AND, logic NAND, logic OR, logic NOR arrays, etc., or combinations thereof.
One particularly useful type of specialized processing block, which is sometimes also referred to as a digital signal processing (DSP) block, may be used to process digital signals such as video signals, audio signals, etc. Such blocks are frequently also referred to as multiply-accumulate (MAC) blocks, because they include structures to perform multiplication operations, and sums and/or accumulations of multiplication operations.
Integrated circuits such as programmable integrated circuits often include specialized processing blocks. Each of those specialized processing blocks includes multipliers, adders, and registers, as well as programmable connectors (e.g., multiplexers) that allow the various components of the block to be configured in different ways.
Typically, the arithmetic operators (adders and multipliers) in such specialized processing blocks have been fixed-point operators. If floating-point operators were needed, they would be constructed outside the specialized processing block using general-purpose programmable logic of the device, or using a combination of the fixed-point operators inside the specialized processing block with additional logic in the general-purpose programmable logic.